This is the first in a three-part series looking at what needs to be done to make Parliament House a safe place for all.
Australia has almost reached gender parity in Parliament, with women making up 43% of the majority Labor government. It’s a refreshing change after so many years of Scott Morrison’s lies, broken promises and a government that protects men at all costs.
But a different government doesn’t necessarily mean a different Parliament, and simply having more women in the mix doesn’t guarantee a less toxic culture.
This three-part series will explore exactly what needs to change in Parliament (and whose responsibility it is to change it), why change will be slow to come, and how Parliament should be the leading example of modern, gender-equitable workplaces.
The major changes to look out for
Sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins’ review of parliamentary culture, Set the Standard, painted a picture of a toxic, unsafe workplace with limited accountability for abusers. It found that 37% of people had experienced some form of bullying, one in three some form of sexual harassment, and 1% actual or attempted sexual assault.
The review made 28 recommendations, some of which have already been set in motion, including establishing an independent parliamentary standards commission to respond to complaints, best-practice training for MPs and an acknowledgement of abuse and harassment within Parliament.
Along with implementing all of Jenkins’ recommendations, Labor has also agreed to implement all 55 recommendations from Jenkins’ broader report into Australian workplaces, “Respect@Work”.
Here’s what else to look out for:
- A positive duty of care within all Australian workplaces to prevent sexual discrimination and harassment, as recommended in the Respect@Work report
- A code of conduct for parliamentarians and staff, established by the Joint Standing Committee on Parliamentary Standards
- Diversity targets and public reporting of diversity characteristics among parliamentarians and staff
- No more late-night votes or extended working times following a review of the order of business
- No more slurs, abusive, sexist or discriminatory comments used in parliamentary chambers (that includes Question Time) enforced by presiding officers
- Complaints — both current and historic — to be dealt with by the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service.
A good first step to a diverse Parliament
Parliament’s lack of diversity, Jenkins found, meant other groups were marginalised and vulnerable to misconduct, discrimination, bullying and assault. The 47th Parliament has record numbers of female, Indigenous and independent politicians, with four new First Nations representatives and three new independents.
While it’s not in newly elected women’s job descriptions to overhaul parliamentary workplaces, lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU) Global Institute for Women’s Leadership Blair Williams tells Crikey it’s a good first step.
“It’s not just the stale pale male group and I think that itself will result in some changes. It erodes that boys’ club — especially that Liberal boys’ club — that we’ve been seeing in politics for quite a while,” she says.
Despite this Parliament’s diversity, she says, more needs to be done: “The Coalition is massively holding [gender parity] back — the level of female representation hasn’t changed and they need to do something.”
Parliament is expected to introduce diversity targets and release public reporting on its characteristics — which will highlight where it’s falling behind and whether representation extends to staffers.
As Gender Policy Fellow at ANU Sonia Palmieri tells Crikey, the new, more diverse Parliament is “a first but really just initial step to cultural change”.
A respectful workplace with regular hours
While still a majority government, with fewer politicians representing the two major parties there are hopes the protection racket seen during the Coalition’s nine-year reign will be disrupted.
Palmieri believes fewer career politicians, and more independents coming from a wide range of working backgrounds, means poor behaviour previously ignored as “the norm” won’t be tolerated.
“They are coming in from workplaces that don’t expect to see bullying and harassment as kind of the norm, which is what we have seen for the past two decades,” she says.
“They’re coming in from workplaces where accountability is now built-in, so they are the ones who are going to be holding the Parliament to account [and] entrench new standards, rules and expectations.”
Much of Parliament House’s cultural problems stem from staffers feeling isolated after flying into Canberra, working long hours in a “work-hard, play-hard” culture fuelled by excessive alcohol consumption, and the unpredictability of working hours.
The Joint Standing Committee on Parliamentary Standards is set to review working hours, alcohol policies and the code of conduct — but how well enforced these will be remains to be seen.
“What we’d really like to see is a different workplace for members as well, and that really does come down to the hours, which then sets the tone for things like drinking and workplace dinners and functions,” Palmieri says.
“It’s about Parliament accepting that it doesn’t need to work as this unique workplace because everyone has to fly in and maximise the time that they’re there. We now have lots of different ways of working as we’ve understood for the past two years.”
A lead-by-example approach
The election showed Australians were fed up with politicians’ combative approach and were looking for a softer style of leadership.
Executive Chair of the McKell Institute in Queensland Rachel Nolan — who is a former Queensland Labor MP — believes Albanese’s leadership style will have a huge impact on the way other MPs behave — more so, she says, than changing working hours.
“Just because you’re working long hours doesn’t mean there has to be that culture associated with that,” she says.
Adding a “critical mass” of women, coupled with Albanese’s leadership style, will make Parliament “a more inclusive and more considered place”.
“The leader absolutely sets the tone … it’s likely the nature of parliamentary debate will all change,” she says.
Tomorrow: The face of change. Why simply diversifying Parliament won’t shift its toxic culture.
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The scene has now been set with different leadership style, cutting down numbers of the swinging dicks club and so many women and people of diverse cultures and work experiences, and increased intellectual capacity entering the Parliament. Our country, economy , society and future progress will be ever so much improved as a result
Yes an increased intellectual capacity entering Parliament . Like a comment coming from Lidia Thorpe to Hollie Hughes ” at least I can keep my legs shut.” Hardly a white stale male problem only
I’m sure that we’ll still see and hear stuff we would prefer was “nicer” but did you really mean to make such a broad dismissal of a whole bunch of awesome women?
Jimmy was pointing out that women are capable and have behaved badly in parliament too. How do you see that as a broad dismissal of all women in parliament. Maybe a broad dismissal of your gendered stereotyping.
My question was a genuine one. It sounded like Jimmyg was questioning the intellectual capacity of the new women parliamentarians by leading with the Lidia Thorpe example and I asked a civil question of him – is that what he really meant? And Jimmyg hasn’t answered it. And there was no gender stereoptyping on my part. As far as I see, we have a whole bunch of awesome women new in parliament. The fact that each of them had supporters and grass roots volunteers that were reported to be in the thousands, all of whom would know their candidates in some way, would indicate that we DO have an awesome bunch of new women in parliament and along with some decent leadership, I expect they’ll make a contribution to making parliament a more useful and effective organization. And by that I mean that the adversarial nature of, call it the two party system, has meant that the governing of the country came way down the list of what’s important to them and that’s become neither useful nor effective.
I think the point people are making (I certainly am) is that by simply being female, doesnt make them awesome nor does it mean they wont be aggressive, nor that they will reshape parliament.
People of both sexes are tired of the 2 parties and voted for change. The fact that so many of the indep MPs are women is confounding the analysis, and plenty of feminists are leveraging that to portray this as a gender revolution.
To me the critical thing is that we have people willing to break away from their party if it refuses to listen to the electorate as (that’s how our democracy was meant to work.
And secondly, so many of the new MPs are new to politics. More diversity of backgrounds rather than party hacks is what we need. More doctors, business professionals, social workers …
That they’re female? Couldn’t care less.
Ahhh thankyou Strawman, now I understand where you’re coming from. It turns out we have more in common than we would first have thought given our differences in some areas – funny how that happens in a conversation hey? I hadn’t thought of this as a gender revolution – more a backlash to the blatant and appalling misogyny and contempt for women by the big swinging dick culture as exposed so well by Crikey over the last year. But you’ve made me reflect – if it is a gender revolution, would that be such a bad thing?
If the gender revolution is able to remove barriers to women taking their fair place in society and stop there, well that would be wonderful.
However revolutions tend to morph into mob rule. The MeToo and Blacklivesmatter causes have run into these issues.
So either the revolutionaries police themselves (highly unlikely for revolutionaries) or society pushes back at the appropriate point.
Ultimately change needs to be gradual and considered, not forced and rushed. That’s not an excuse to dither btw. Failure to do this collaboratively and we end up like UK with Brexit, the US with anti abortion or voter rights or immigration policies etc, or climate change in Australia. Laws just get yanked back and forth between successive governments cancelling out the previous changes.
Thanks for the civil discussion.
‘a whole bunch of awesome women’ – not quite…
I guess this wouldn’t include, as cited in the Jenkins Review
‘women who were more likely to be using bullying behaviour within CPWs than men, particularly in instances involving one bully. Of those instances involving one bully, the data indicates that 61% of bullies were women compared with 35% of men..’
And looking at the wider population….
“The review of 23 studies found that self-defense, expressing anger, control, desire for the partner’s attention, and retaliation motivated women’s [intimate partner violence] perpetration. Indeed, being victimized by an intimate partner is consistently one of the strongest predictors of IPV perpetration for both men and women (O’Leary and Slep, 2012).”
“….the behavioral data are clear in that women tend to engage in predominantly indirect aggression, IPV with equal frequency but lesser severity than men, and rarely sexual aggression. Thus, our review is in accord with Richardson (2005), who noted that women are quite capable of aggression.”
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00081/full
Worth reading given the interest in Heard v Depp.
Jimmyg seemed to be questioning the intellectual capacity of new women in parliament – and they weren’t there when the Jenkins review was done – so I stand by my “whole bunch of awesome women” – in the context that I already mentioned, that thousands of volunteers who know them got behind these new local independents and I can’t imagine that thousands of volunteers were inspired by unintelligence.
Either way, the women in Parliament (who I support) have set the bar high for their performance. They were voted in with a mandate and any failures will be pounced upon as hypocrisy…which I’ll support.
Only 85% of eligible 18+ Australians are enrolled, vote and cast a valid 2PP vote that is counted. So you’d need to get a 2PP of at least 60% to claim a mandate.
In all seriousness, maybe Crikey should keep a running rally of the nasty comments by party and by gender. The voting public voted for other parties and other genders because they wanted to see change, and so maybe erect a virtual polly scoreboard and report on it quarterly?
I am not sure we hear the worst of it. Coalition MPs calling Labor women “quota girls” across the chamber is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
In my employment experience, a few years females ago said they didnt want standards to be lowered nor to receive special treatment. They were worried they wouldn’t be respected by males or female who made the grade previously. What they wanted was for barriers to be removed. That was the mantra and that got near universal support.
Then more recently quotas became the mantra.
Lidia Thorpe will always be the exception that proves the rule.
Maybe question time will be worth watchibg. The abusive, confrontational garbage we had before was so offensive it should had a warning on it
In my experience the workplace changes once there are roughly equal men and women at all levels. Women become normalised as co-workers and treated accordingly. Then we just need more cultural diversity. . .
Not from what I’ve experienced. The first guard of females in male dominated positions act just like the boys, but those personalities would be attracted to such push and shove workplaces, especially when they are getting a hearty leg up the ladder.
It takes sometime for the workplace to then have the courage to start pointing out the lasses are acting just like the lads and then putting them in check or moving them on. Typically the complaints are ignored as the whining of the no longer privileged patriarchy….until the other females in the office start making complaints too. THEN we start to see real cultural change.
I’ve seen this play out in a few organizations. Doesnt mean it’s not a just cause, but let’s drop this ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’ rhetoric.
I am not suggesting that women are better than men. All I am saying is that in my experience, once it stops being a novelty to have women as equals in the workplace, once the people sitting around you in the open plan, doing the same work are women , then they become regarded as colleagues and treated as such.
That’s very true. I couldn’t care less what gender or orientation or race they are. How people behave is what matters and in my recent workplaces there are no shortage of female managers bullying people because they know they are in the gender honeymoon period where a key kpi is ensuring the organisation reaches gender parity. Work quality, office culture, productivity? Those are secondary.
That’s very true. I couldn’t care less what gender or orientation or race they are. How people behave is what matters and in my recent workplaces there are no shortage of female managers bu llying people because they know they are in the gender honeymoon period where a key kpi is ensuring the organisation reaches gender parity. Work quality, office culture, productivity? Those are secondary.
More importantly most younger men will have or have had a female boss, and get over themselves.
Young men shouldnt have an issue with a female boss if she keeps gender out of the equation. The problem comes if she starts discriminating against them for being males.
This affirmative action will accelerate gender parity, but on the other hand it is penalizing those young males for the social norms of generations BEFORE them.
Our current young men have been raised to believe in treating everyone equally and yet they alone are being asked to pay for the previous generations norms. Add in the housing crisis, increased immigration, feminists who feel they can now be overly sexist in the media/office/socially … and society will be heading for a backlash if it’s not careful because that’s basic human nature.
We – as in media and its readers and commentators have almost as much to think about as as our politicians. The oppositional, confrontational, dismissive and demonising of others with different points of view happens outside parliament too and we’re all responsible for our share in it.
I count five new independants, not three.